Seunghyun Baek (AKA StuntB)

Location : Seoul, Korea

Being raised up with the absence of parental guidance as a child, Baek didn’t have the luxury of getting parental attention. However, if there was one it would be his very first skateboard as a gift he received in the X-mas present he got in 1987. As a child, seeing other kids falling on the pavement and getting up on the board seemed ridiculous and didn’t make sense but once he set foot on his first board, it was a different story. During those days, skate shops were hard to come by and the price of a board wasn’t cheap for a kid. He had hand me down decks with worn out noses and tails, Thrasher magazines with all the important pages torn out along with VHS skate videos with the film all stretched but he would watch it over and over again till it gets all worn out. He would work part time just to buy a skateboard of his own and he remembers getting into a car accident and messing up his leg.

All these bits and pieces of memories flared his love for skating and it became his life. His skate master Mr. Jun (Bong-guk) taught him the Jedi master moves getting me more involved in the skate scene but it wasn’t until he won his first local skate event that lead him to the path of skateboarding. By winning various competitions, he was able to get sponsors and right about when he was about to graduate high school, he got a sponsor offer to go to the United States to skate. Although he has been accepted to 3 different colleges, he didn’t look back and took the path of skateboarding. However, due to the company’s internal reasons, he was declined the sponsorship leaving him back to the drawing board.

Regardless, he still decided to continue on this path and got an offer from his skate shop sponsor Mr. Kim(Jin-tae) to make Korea’s first signature deck “StuntB Skateboards”. This is where everything all started… After making the first signature deck in 2003, StuntB started to expand its territory towards skate related products and media production accumulating up to 10 StuntB skate crew members as to this day.

StuntB also supports its athletes to participate overseas competitions, and on 2010 for the “Kia World Extreme Games”, we were able to meet Don Bostick in Shanghai thanks to our current WCS coordinator Elbert Kim, and with Don’s consent, we were able to have our athlete compete in the event. During that event, for the first time in Korean history, the first Korean athlete was able to get into the finals and at the age of 14! StuntB Crew Jihoon Lee ranked 5th place proving that StuntB has what it takes to represent the Korean skate scene.

Even afterwards, StuntB hosts and competes in various competitions, but it became more apparent that in order for skateboarding to establish a strong root in Korea, there needs to be an education process to nurture skateboarding which is still not a mainstream sport in order to set foot as a core sport culture among the youth. I want to give back to the community the various benefits and inspiring moments to the future skaters so people here can enjoy skating in a better environment.